My trip to Somerset with my mum last Tuesday solved one mystery: the building we always referred to in my childhood as 'Lady Hobhouses' is in fact Hadspen House, or rather (brace yourselves) The Newt, so named since the Hobhouses sold it and it reopened as a hotel. But that was an aside. We were aiming instead at Wyke Farm just north of Castle Cary. My granddad once worked at Wyke Farm and my sister has a painted Wyke milk churn in the garden; now you need more than a couple of dozen cows to provide enough cheese for every supermarket in the country, and when you pull into the site at Wyke Champflower its vast silos and silent warehouses look, I always think, like the menacing industrial sites Jon Pertwee spent a lot of time running around as Dr Who in the early '70s. How iconic of modern farming. This opinion has led to my sister referring to Wyke Farm's produce as 'Dalek cheese' which I think they are missing a trick not to make. But my mum just bought the sort of standard cheddar you can get anywhere though she maintains it adds something to buy it on-site. I am cutting my dairy intake, but it being a special occasion it was back in Cary itself that I picked up some cheese at the market, Cricket St Thomas Camembert and spicy Calveley Mill Scorpion; though I steered clear of one labelled starkly 'Hard Goat'.
I also found this little figurine in a junk shop in town. At first glance it seems to be a finial from something larger but then you realise it has a base and was always intended as freestanding, so I suspect that while it may look old but it's in fact been copied from something else. It will go ... somewhere.
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